Bloodshot (31 page)

“Shop?”

“It used to be a shop. They made rubber boot soles or something. You’re facing out over the floor, right?”

“Right. I can see these guys, Raylene—”

“Ignore them. Turn around and, quiet as you can, head back inside.”

“Inside the vent?” More squeaking.

“Did I mumble? Yes, get back inside the vent. It ought to be big enough for you to turn around, but do it quietly.”

“But it’s dark back there!” he complained. “I can’t see anything.”

“Doesn’t matter. I know which way the thing goes. I’ll talk you through it, come on. Turn around and start crawling.”

“I’m putting the phone in my shirt pocket,” he told me. “Hang on.”

So I hung on while he scraped, scooted, and dragged himself down the square metal track that wormed back deeper into the building. During this lull in the conversation, Adrian came to crouch beside me—moving without making even the slightest sound.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

I put my hand over the phone’s “receiver” end. “Not so much. And thanks for being quiet. Do me a favor, please? Stay that way. Nothing personal, but this is bad.”

“Are you talking to a kid?”

“Yes. It’s a long story. I’ll tell you soon. Please, please,
please
do me a favor and leave me alone for a few minutes. Just let me talk him through this, and I promise I’ll tell you anything you want when this is sorted out.”

“Raylene?” Domino called softly.

I waved Adrian away again. He nodded grimly and walked away, going back to my bedroom and closing himself in there. I couldn’t complain. He’d slept on the couch after all, and my bedroom was definitely the most isolated part of the unit.

I returned my attention to Domino. “What?”

“Who are you talking to?”

“A … a friend. Don’t worry about it. How’s your progress?”

“I can’t see anything!”

I said, “I know. And I’m sorry. But there’s a fork up ahead.”

“I already found it.”

“You found it?” I pinched at the spot between my eyebrows and fought to remember the layout. “Then you’ll need to take the right tunnel. And I’m sorry, but it’s going to be blind. You just have to trust me that it’s going to play out all right.”

He said, “I trust you.”

I didn’t believe him. I didn’t even think
he
believed him. But he didn’t have a choice and I appreciated the vote of confidence, so I said, “Good. All you have to do is listen to me, and I’ll have you out on the roof in a jiffy.”

“The roof?”

“Yes, the roof. There are two old fire escapes up there, either one of which you can use to let yourself down. They aren’t super-sturdy, but you don’t weigh a hundred pounds and I’ve seen you scramble like a monkey. You’ll be fine.”

“It’s raining. They’ll be wet.”

“It’s always raining. It’s always wet.” In Seattle, if you let the
weather keep you from going about your business, you’ll never leave the house. He knew it as well as I did, though. I understood that he was only talking to hear his own voice, however quietly.

Domino was alone in the dark, in a space so narrow I would’ve thought twice about using it myself. He couldn’t see his hand in front of his face, and I shuddered to consider the rats, roaches, and other assorted nasties he was pushing aside in order to follow my directions. All things being equal, he was probably better off without a light. Without a light, he couldn’t see the spiderwebs he was breaching with his hands and his head; he couldn’t see the riveted seams that were rusty around the rims, and always looked ready to split and break.

“How you doing in there?” I asked.

“Okay,” he grunted. “Wait. I think I’ve hit the end.”

“You have. Sort of. It’s going to go up now. You’re going to have to climb.”

“What?”

“You heard me, monkey-boy. There are seams in those joints about a foot and a half apart. It’ll take some learning and you’re going to have to play it very, very cool—but there’s no way around it. You’re going to have to climb.”

“I … I don’t know.”

“You can do it,” I vowed. “You’re lanky enough and strong enough, and you’ll be fine.”

“What’s lanky got to do with it?” he asked.

I could hear him adjusting himself, sitting upright in the place where the vent took a sudden upward turn at a sharp, narrow joint. I said, “Keep your voice down. You’re between the floors, but you’re not in another dimension. Be careful or they’ll hear you.”

“Okay.”

“Good boy. Now work your way into that shaft and brace your back up against one of the sides. Then stick your feet out and brace
your knees and toes against the opposite side. You understand what I’m saying?”

“I think so.”

I hoped I wasn’t about to let him down, because in truth, I had no idea if he was capable of climbing this way. “This next part’s going to get a little noisy, but you’re going to be going up inside one of the walls and if anybody hears you, they might assume rats.” And for very good reason, I thought, but I didn’t say that part out loud. “As long as no one hears you talking.”

“Got it.”

“You said you’d stuck the phone in your shirt pocket before—can you do that again and still hear me?”

“Yeah.”

The phone went through yet another shift, brushing up against his shirt and his hands and casting back that metallic echo from within the squared-off tube.

In a fairly soft whisper he asked, “Can you still hear me?”

“I can still hear you,” I said back, in something closer to a normal tone of voice. It had to carry from his pocket to his ear after all. “Now this is what you do—”

“I think I got it,” he cut in. “Use my butt and my feet to hold myself, and my arms to pull and push myself up.”

I was silent, then I said, “That’s pretty much it. You catch on quick.”

“I’m not
stupid,
” he assured me.

My instinct was to retort, “I never said you were.” But I was pretty sure that somewhere, at some distant point in the past, I had almost certainly said precisely that. So I let him have his little victory, proving me wrong. “Let me know when you get to the top.”

“Will … there … be … another split?” he asked, muffled groans and slipping mumbles interrupting his words.

“No. It’ll veer off to the left, and then it’s a straight shot to the
ventilation hut on the roof. You’ll have to kick your way out, but that thing is sixty years old if it’s a day and I’m pretty sure you can handle it.” I said all this glibly, as if I’d remembered all along that the ventilation system was capped outside. In fact, I’d completely forgotten—and I’d also forgotten that this was a fourteen-year-old boy, and not a vampire who could pop the thing off with a twist of his wrist.

“All right,” he said. He sounded about as sure as I felt, but I went on faking it, because what else could I do?

“Seriously, don’t worry about it. It’s rusted all to hell, if it’s even still in place. It’s just one of those old spinny things that lets the air out and keeps the rain from getting in.”

“Like a fan?” he asked, and the squeal of his shoe on the metal made my teeth hurt.

“No, not like a fan. It’s not going to eat you alive or anything. It’s just a little metal piece … more like a pinwheel, really.”

“What’s a pinwheel?”

“What’s a …? Jesus Christ, I’m not
that
old. A pinwheel—you know. You blow on it, and it spins around. Usually made of pretty colored paper or foil or something. Work with me, kid.”

“Whatever you say.”

I got the distinct impression he thought I was yanking his chain, but that was fine. Anything to keep him occupied while he scaled the entirety of a sixteen-foot story vertically, in a metal tube with not a shred of light.

“It’s an old-fashioned toy.”

“Never seen one.” Another three-word response. It was probably all he could get in between heaves and hos.

After what felt like an interminable amount of time just waiting for him to reach the top, he did in fact reach it. He reached it with a fumble and a slip that came perilously close to dumping him straight back down the chute. He didn’t tell me this, but I could
hear it in the havoc of the phone turning and flipping in that pocket, and in the desperate scrabble of his feet on the metal, hunting for some purchase that wasn’t compromised by dust and the decay of decades.

“You make it?” I asked, once I was pretty sure that he had, in fact, made it.

“Yeah,” he said with a gasp.

“Good job. Now like I said, just go left.”

He did, and before long he’d worked his way up to the vent with the spinner, and thank God I was right—he dislodged it with just a couple of shoves. I could hear rusty metal giving way and a clatter as the rooftop wonder burst up into the open sky and into a faceful of rain.

I had no way of knowing if he’d made enough noise to summon anybody, so I said to him, “No time to dawdle. Run around the rooftop edge and see where they’re parked; then pick the farthest fire escape and let yourself down onto the ground.”

“What?”

The phone had still been in his shirt. Out in the open, he couldn’t hear me that way. I repeated myself, and he said, “Yeah, I’m way ahead of you. Hang on.”

The whistling of wind and the occasional patter of rain on the microphone made a strange symphony while he darted from corner to corner, keeping low and staying light-footed if he knew what was good for him.

“They’re parked out front, on the street. I don’t see any cars in the back.”

“Then go down the back, but be careful. Put the phone back in your shirt. Let me know when you’ve got your feet on the ground.”

“Okay.”

Again I waited—always this god-awful waiting, where there
was nothing I could do and I couldn’t even say anything to be helpful, because the kid would never hear me, and anyway, I’d only distract him.

I detected the wet creak of old metal, and bolts that were rusting into place.

A splash announced his landing, and shortly thereafter he had the phone back up to his face again. “I’m down,” he told me.

“Right. Now I want you to walk away from the building at a swift but innocuous pace, all the way to the end of the street where the frozen yogurt place is, next to that coffee shop.”

“Away from the building? But Pepper—”

“Pepper is either in one of those cars outside the building, or inside it very securely.”

“And what does that word mean? Inno-something.”

“
Innocuous
. It means try not to look like you’re running away. Listen, punk. When you get to the end of the street, I want you to go into that coffee place and buy some hot chocolate.”

“Are you crazy?” He was on the verge of losing his whisper.

“And stop whispering,” it occurred to me to tell him. “It makes you look guilty.” Before he could interrupt me again I continued, “Go get some hot chocolate and then, nice and lazy and slow, I want you to stroll back down the street to where their cars are hanging out.”

“Oh. Okay.”

Good, he was catching on. “They don’t know what you look like, do they?”

“I don’t guess.”

“Let’s assume they don’t. And let’s also remind ourselves that being a nosy kid isn’t a crime. So go get yourself some hot chocolate and mosey back over to the vehicles. Hang around and listen, if you can. See if you can overhear anything. But keep the phone up to your ear. Pretend like you’re talking to somebody.”

Suddenly he sounded afraid again. “You’re not going to hang up on me, are you?”

“I am, in a minute. But only for a minute, while you go get the hot chocolate. I didn’t spring for an expensive phone, bucko. The battery on that thing isn’t going to last all night.”

“Oh yeah,” he said, and the proximity of his voice to the mike told me he was checking the display.

“I haven’t heard it beeping low battery, but still you want to conserve the thing. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess you didn’t take the charger when you ran?”

“Shit,” he complained. “I should’ve thought of it. I should’ve grabbed it.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Only a crazy person would’ve thought that meticulously about evacuating a scene.” By which I meant that I, personally, kept my chargers and all important electronics in my oversized purse-slash-messenger-bag. “It’ll be fine for a little while. Now I’m going to hang up, and I want you to call me back when you’re at the edge of the action, okay?”

“Got it. And Raylene?”

“What?”

“Thanks,” he said before flipping the thing shut.

I’m not going to lie. It almost gave me a warm fuzzy.

I exhaled a huge breath—one that I hadn’t even realized I’d been holding. As if this elongated gasp were a signal, Adrian came swanning back out of the bedroom (how could he have heard it in there?) and into the dining area, where I was sitting just shy of a fetal position upright. I began to uncurl, letting my legs straighten out on the floor and putting my head in my hands—leaving the cell phone beside me.

Adrian said, “Dare I ask?”

Without looking up I said, “Ask away.”

“What was that about?”

So I told him. I didn’t tell him everything; I mean, I’m not
stupid
. I didn’t know him well enough to give him the address of the place or the finer particulars. But I filled him in on the kids, and I made my standard disclaimers regarding my place in their maintenance. I told him about the place that once was a factory, and now was my warehouse, and how it was at right that moment being swarmed over by federal agents—or special forces ops, or CIA dudes, or whatever those guys were. Guys like Peter Desarme.

Right around the time I’d finished explaining everything I felt like explaining, the phone rang again. I’d forgotten I was holding it, and when it began to yodel and vibrate I nearly had a heart attack, flipping the thing up into the air and catching it—miraculously without hanging up on Domino, who was calling me back.

“Kid,” I answered, knowing it was him.

“Hey,” he said in a casual voice that only trembled around the edges, a tiny bit. He was doing good.

“Where are you now?”

“Oh, I’m just on my way home, you know how it is,” he told me, which also told me that there were other people within listening distance.